Talk:Operation Ouka/@comment-26331553-20151206173516/@comment-26331553-20151210011850
After further review, I think I was erroneously attributing malice to what was merely a bad decision in a critical situation. That said, the fact that the dive assault was a suicide mission from the start means that there was even less reason to not keep the entire force as concentrated as feasible; you don't care about securing an escape route, and the arbitrarily large number of enemy reinforcements means that maintaining an assault concentration to ensure the fastest possible progress is the overriding objective. The whole series of events, actually, is really interesting from a historical/military perspective; it illustrates perfectly how smart people and skilled commanders make bad decisions. Largely, I think core problem is that the events surrounding The Defense of Yokohama Base panicked the high command, and they overreacted in the speed of response. Certinly, the Superior is a major threat, but consider: Yokohama ended on December 29, and Ouka kicked off only two days later. Consider, however, that the decision to launch an invasion of mainland Europe in 1944 was made in mid-May of 1943, and Overlord didn't take place until early June of '44. Granted, the Kashgar raid was basically an assassination mission, so there was no need to plan for any followup support or advances, and the suicidal nature of the attack precluded the need to worry about holding a beachhead. However, trying to organize a Corps-scale orbital drop operation in two days was insane''. ''Setting the drop date for something closer to mid-January wold have had a number of benefits: Pre-positioning supplies in orbit: MLA tech is good enough that orbital lift capability is largely time-dependent; having more time means launch vehicles can be run to space with cargo and land, refuel and reload, and launch again. Contrast with real life, where launch is asset-dependent: the amount you can lift to orbit is a function of how many boosters you have, and getting more requires you to build more rockets this could be beneficial in a number of ways; better bombardment, more decoys, more kamikaze divers, etc. Mobilizing resources: At the scale of military action, two days warning basically means you're launching with what you have, and they're starting where they are now. Further, any support or assistance assets will be working with the units they are in the vicinity of; industrialized military formations can't move a considerable distance, and '''then immediacy fight with any degree of effectiveness. '''Fix the Susanoo: This is a big one; all the best weapons on the HI-MAERF weapon were inoperable for the attack. The railguns were offline, and the effectiveness demonstrated in Total Eclipse of such systems would have been useful for a number of reasons. The particle cannon worked, but not while the grav-field was active; given that the shield was what made the Susanoo could have any chance of surviving the attention it held, and the damaged Moorcock-Lechte Engine engine weakened the shield overall, which likely required far more Look out, Sir!-induced deaths on the reentry. Read Starship Troopers: It's clear that whoever did the top-level planning hadn't, and it shows. Namely: >One of the things that helps a capsule trooper to live long enough to draw a pension is that the skins peeling off his capsule not only slow him down, they also fill the sky over the target area with so much junk that radar picks up reflections from dozens of targets for each man in the drop, any one of which could be a man, or a bomb,or anything. And >to add to the fun your ship lays a series of dummy eggs in the seconds immediately following your drop, dummies that will fall faster because they don’t slough. They get under you, explode, throw out "window," even operate as transponders, rocket sideways, and do other things to add to the confusion of your reception committee on the ground. The reentry shells do slough, but that darn square-cube thing means that they wouldn't be putting off as much junk as an equivent weight of M.I. pods, and the apparenty passive optical targering of the Laser-class means a slightly different stragety is requied. Assuming thermonuclear flashbangs are off the table, dedicated devices to create shrouds of incandescent chaff progresivly replaced below the Divers to obstruct view would be best, as well as full decoys; armor plates to sustain the reentry stress, with facade structures to give them the same visual profile and aerodynamic characterictics as the real shells, which they outnumber by at least a factor of two. (Yes, while the mass would be constant, they could easilly be assembled in space and added to a drop wave rather than having to be lifted from Earth.) Nuke it from orbit: If there had been more time for planning, someone might have realized that they could have used sequential G-bomb strikes to dig the Superior out of the main hall, or if they were dedicated to a suicide attack, at least used nuclear weapons to clear the surface. It is unlikely that increasing the delay from two days to ten or twelve would have been six times as dangerous; the BETA would still have to have massed forces to attack any of the other major defense lines (remember that they still had a numerical advantage over the Yokohama TSF units of at least 120 to one. That level of concentration could be disrupted for the timeframe required with conventional thermonuclear weapons, assuming it could be gathered fast enough to be relevant. In any cases, the operation itself is a great example of snowballing problems; starting when the Laser-Class ignored the AL warheads. Ignoring the possible methods of utilizing this (immediatly changend the shells to a mix of AL and destructive airburst rounds and walking fire across laser concentration, or immediately doping nukes in similar shells), the failure of the first wave led to the devastating losses escorting the Susanoo to the surface, and so forth. While there was little they could have done without a heads-up call to taget the lasers directly (assuming that would have worked) a single point of failure is extremely bad in engineering, but downright suicidal in warfare.